


Brambles Bloom in Summer

by Anefi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, POV Stiles Stilinski, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Slash, Protective Stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-20 02:11:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17013579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: You don't get tortured in a basement by a septuagenarian together and not bond on some level, okay? Stiles just wants to check up on Erica and Boyd.The resulting conversation with Derek takes an unexpected turn.





	Brambles Bloom in Summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suburbanmotel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suburbanmotel/gifts).



> Happy Secret Santa suburbanmotel! A little early-season near-canon hurt/comfort, just for you <3
> 
> Thanks to allourheroes and Novkat21 for looking it over; any remaining mistakes (and em-dashes) are my own.

Stiles would freely admit he’d been avoiding the cafeteria.

After several months of literally hunting her classmates and trying to make hats from them, it was reasonable that Allison would avoid gen pop during lunch block. But somehow, neither this action nor any of the aforementioned _attempted murders_ prevented Scott from sighing disconsolately and staring through several walls toward wherever she had taken to hiding during lunch. Without Allison as a buffer, neither Scott nor Stiles were welcome at the cool kids table with Lydia and Danny, despite the fact that the Jackson-shaped dent Stiles had put in Roscoe's hood had ended up being in that douchebag's benefit.

It would’ve been like the good old days, Scott and Stiles vs The World, but in the good old days Scott would have told Stiles about his stupid plan to replace Gerard’s prescriptions with magic sawdust, and they would have figured out something better together and saved everybody a lot of pain and mechanic’s bills and therapy, and maybe Stiles was still pissed off about it. So, he started eating outside. It was warmer, just into summer, and the picnic tables in the sunlight were mostly dry by lunch time after the heavy morning dew. He had a good view of the parking lot, and the lacrosse field, and the woods, in case—in case.

The first few days, he didn’t worry about who was missing. Well—that was a lie. Stiles always worried. But he didn’t worry _much_. He didn’t worry _more_. Everybody was still shell-shocked and recovering; even werewolves with magical healing powers could be traumatized, and he couldn’t blame anybody for taking some time for themselves. Jackson had noped out to another continent. His own swollen bruises slowly healed to mushy purple and moldy green, though the worry lines on his dad’s face only seemed to get deeper.

Then, he thought—maybe they were just taking the rest of the year off. Maybe not everybody decided to cope with the aftermath of being tortured in a nice subdevelopment basement by studying every waking minute to make straight A’s on their finals in a desperate twofold attempt to make their fathers proud and convince them everything was fine after a semester of being—after a _super shitty_ semester. That would be—understandable, he thought, as he drove slowly past a little brick house with ironwork over the windows. He thought he saw the blinds twitch. He was probably wrong.

The Sunday after his last final, 4 AM found him turning his phone over and over in his hands. Cheeto dust coated his keyboard, pajama pants, and probably most of his face. He was out of homework. He was out of Redbull. He sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep. The long break stretched ahead of him like a bleak and lonely desert, barren of weekends with Scott or ride-alongs with his dad or—hopefully—supernatural or supernatural-adjacent attacks to his person. He’d shaken himself out of staring at a Worgen NPC as his Warcraft guild chat flowed around him unseen, and enough was enough. His fingers hovered over the screen. He unlocked it for the third time. With a sigh, he opened a text message and addressed it to Ralaar Fangfire.

> _Haven’t seen Catwoman or Mr. Freeze around_ , he typed out. > _Next time we play Dungeons and Dragons, we need a better DM_.

He flopped back onto the bed.

He expected—well, he expected nothing. He hoped for at least a two-word answer, maybe in the morning. Preferably, < _They’re fine_.

What he got was Derek shoving open his fucking window in the middle of the night and slinking through like a particularly sexy jungle cat. Not that Stiles was attracted to—cats.

He flailed upright and gestured violently for Derek to exit back through the window from whence he came. “No!” he whisper-shouted. “Absolutely not!”

Derek glanced around the room and impassively judged his person, his living space, and his life. “How many Cheetos have you eaten today?”

“Oh, I don’t know, approximately—” Stiles pretended to count on his fingers “—fuck you, get out!”

“Cute,” Derek said. “When did you see Erica and Boyd?”

 Stiles froze mid-sneer. “They didn’t tell you?”

Derek just looked at him. For the first time, Stiles noticed that their unfriendly neighborhood alpha was sporting some dark circles of his own. His shoulders were rounded, slack. Hunched.

All that worry he’d been studiously ignoring rose like bile to the back of his throat. “They didn’t make it back,” he surmised.

“They were coming back?”

The vulnerable flicker of hope made Stiles’s chest seize. He had a front row seat to a tragedy in three acts as Derek’s realization hit. They _had been_ coming back. They hadn’t made it. Either they’d changed their minds—or something, _someone_ had stopped them. Derek being Derek, his train of thought derailed somewhere between guilt and anger and blew up at the nearest bystander.

“Back from where,” Derek demanded, like it was Stiles’s fault they had all been kidnapped. “Where were you?”

“We were in the Argents’ basement,” Stiles said. “Chris let us out after the game, the night—” the night he'd scored the winning goal, the night he yelled at Lydia and crashed the jeep, the night that tasted like blood in his memories, the night Jackson may have technically died twice— “that night.”

Derek was suddenly right up in his face. “You were at their _house?_ Stiles—” Stiles couldn’t stop his full-body flinch and pained gasp at Derek’s hand on his chest, pressing the still-tender bruises. Derek’s startle gave him almost a full foot of personal space, left him oddly cold. “You’re hurt,” Derek accused. His hands balled into fists.

Stiles rubbed over the fading heat on his chest, fit his fingertips where Derek’s had vacated. “Yeah, yeah, I got my ass kicked by a septuagenarian,” he said sheepishly. He avoided Derek’s eyes, doubly embarrassed by the rise of his blotchy flush.

Derek didn’t laugh. “I didn’t know,” he said.

Which made sense—who would have told him? “Obviously,” Stiles said, and then, more awkwardly, “it’s whatever.” He bulldozed on over the moment when Derek looked like he wanted to reach out again, maybe evaluate the damage to his—however he saw Stiles. “Gerard dragged me in because Erica and Boyd wouldn’t give you up.” Derek’s face only twisted further, which— “No, you idiot,” Stiles said. He should—get better at comforting people. “You were still their alpha. That means you can’t have fucked up too badly, right? They freaked out and ran, yes, but you were still their alpha. So—there’s that.” He winced. “And—maybe they’re fine? Maybe they found another pack? Are there—other packs around here?” If so, he’d like to know where the fuck they’d been when one supernatural psychopath after another spent weeks killing people up and down Main Street Beacon Hills.

Unfortunately, predictably, predictably unfortunately, Derek just looked grim. “There used to be,” he said. His hands flexed, and he shoved them into his pockets, pulling the leather jacket snug around his shoulders as he hunched. “When I was a kid, there were probably a dozen packs within a hundred miles.”

Stiles waited for him to continue. He didn’t. Stiles mapped out his own conclusions from the past tense.

“Wait. Did hunters kill _everyone?_ ”

“No,” Derek said. No elaboration.

Stiles sat on his own foot, tucked it under his thigh before it could start tapping impatiently. “Well—what, then? West Nile? Habitat loss? Were-canine distemper?”

“Shut up,” Derek said. He wavered for a minute before sinking to sit beside Stiles on the bed. “Laura and I never knew. Or—she never told me. We heard rumors, in New York. Whole packs were wiped out. Others vanished.”

“Derek, what you’re describing—that's dozens of people. This is like, the biggest coverup of all time. You’re sure it wasn’t hunters?”

Derek shook his head. “Hunters talk," he said coldly. He met Stiles's eyes. "Hunters brag.”

Stiles’s stomach turned over. He was hit with the sudden, vicious urge to meticulously tear apart every hunter that Derek had ever encountered. The ones he’d overheard, the ones who’d looked at him, the ones who’d killed his family, the ones who’d looked the other way. The ones who’d ever dared to step foot in Stiles’s town.

The ones who’d taken his pack. Whoever they were.

Stiles made a decision.

“We can start looking for Erica and Boyd tomorrow,” he said. “We should go to the Argents’ house first and see if you can pick up a scent trail or something, try to retrace their steps.”

For a long, still moment, Derek only looked at him. Stiles looked back, cataloguing dozens of fleeting microexpressions that he'd for a long time mistaken for anger and could now classify with 80% certainty as—something else. He didn't know what. “We can, huh,” Derek finally said.

Stiles picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. “Well, I mean. That’s what I’m doing. You’re welcome to join me, I guess. Tag along.” The weight of Derek’s eyes was like a physical touch on the side of his face. He felt transparent as glass, flayed open even as he pitifully clung to his illusion of disinterest.

There was a soft huff beside him, and Stiles felt a warm bubble of victory rise in his chest at the assent. He started to smile. The mattress creaked as Derek shifted his weight, and Stiles was pulled toward him with gentle gravity. Before he could flail an arm out to right himself, soft, warm lips pressed against his cheek. His startled inhale brought him the warm, woodsy-leather smell that always followed Derek around. His mouth dropped open without any input from his higher functions. Then Derek was standing up, pulling back, leaving Stiles dazed, skin tingling from the barest scrape of stubble.

“I’ll pick you up in the morning,” he said. Easily. Casually. As if he hadn’t just upended Stiles’s entire world. And _kissed him._ On the _cheek._

Stiles was shocked into speechlessness just long enough for Derek to escape the way he’d come in with the tiniest smirk thrown over his shoulder. He was left staring at his own reflection in the shut window, hand absently resting on his cheek like the heroine in a BBC special. He dropped it.

“Huh,” he said.

Maybe his summer wouldn't be so bad.


End file.
